What is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)? A Beginner’s Guide
In today’s digital world, businesses are overwhelmed with documents—contracts, invoices, receipts, forms, and reports. Most of these documents still arrive in unstructured formats like PDFs, scanned images, or emails, which makes them hard to manage using traditional automation tools. That’s where Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) comes in.
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically extract, classify, and validate data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents. It mimics how a human would read and understand documents—only faster and at scale.
Think of IDP as the next evolution of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), enhanced with machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision.
Document Ingestion
IDP systems can capture documents from multiple sources—scanners, emails, cloud storage, mobile apps, and more
Pre-processing
Cleaning the document (e.g., removing noise or rotating images) to prepare it for analysis.
Document Classification
Automatically identifying the type of document—e.g., invoice, purchase order, ID card, etc.
Data Extraction
Using OCR, ML, and NLP to pull out relevant information like names, dates, invoice amounts, or policy numbers.
Data Validation
Verifying extracted data against rules or external systems (e.g., database lookups).
Integration
Exporting the clean, structured data to downstream systems like ERP, CRM, or RPA platforms.
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INBATEK
Inbatek Team